'Game of Thrones' pop culture translations: Dothraki for 'That's what she said'

Share this:

Anyone who watches “Game of Thrones” is familiar with the guttural and foreign-sounding Dothraki language. But did you know that this is a “real” language, containing a vocabulary of about 3700 words?

Based on this information, Vulture got David J. Peterson, the language’s creator, to translate a bunch of pop-culture phrases into Daenerys Targaryen’s adopted tongue.

The list of phrases we learn in the article is limited but rather entertaining. You can even listen to how each silly sentence sounds in the original article. To get you started, however, here are the translations.

Oddly, there is a Dothraki translation for the word, “milkshake,” as seen in this translation from the celebrated film, “There Will Be Blood.”

“I drink your milkshake.”Anha indek lamekh jesho yeri.

Want to know more about the Dothraki language and its conversational possibilities? Check out this interview with Peterson.

Note: As a language nerd, the author of this article would like to point out some interesting borrowings of Dothraki from other languages. The word for “I,” anha, most likely derives from the Arabic, ana. Similarly, the ki– prefix heard in the YouTube clip when Peterson mentions the Dothraki language, almost certainly comes from Swahili, which uses the same prefix to denote any language (ex: kiswahili = Swahili language).